Get A Job: Daniel Benjamin

A expert on terrorism explains why there’s no reason to be terrified of not having a plan.

By Daniel Munz, Yale University
Monday October 3, 2005

As I navigate through my senior year of college, it sometimes seems as though I am alone among my friends in not planning to begin a post-graduate degree within minutes of my actual graduation. Instead, I have opted to leave the warm shelter of the ivory tower for the cruel vicissitudes of that faraway place known as the Real World. (The stage of life, not the reality show.) I find the prospect of beginning a career exciting, but it also means somehow molding all the ideas, passions, half-awake reveries, and plans scrawled on bar napkins that I’ve accumulated over the past three years into some semblance of a – gulp! – life plan.

Or does it? Daniel Benjamin, a senior analyst studying terrorism at the Center for Strategic International Studies in Washington, D.C., isn’t so sure. “There are no easy answers, and no formulae,” he says. “Just follow your interests. Good fortune helps, but you also need the adventurousness to wind up where you want to be.”

Easy for him to say; while I spend my days careening around campus, frantically looking for one career, he’s already gone through three. His résumé reads like a who’s-who of jobs that politically-inclined undergrads like me salivate over with near-Pavlovian fervor: He’s been a foreign correspondent for leading news outlets, a speechwriter and advisor to the Clinton White House, and a leading TV talking head when it comes to discussion of terrorism. In short, Benjamin seems like the kind of guy you want to talk to if you’re uncertain about transforming your big ideas into big careers, and that’s why he’s the subject of this week’s Get A Job.

Granted, Benjamin didn’t leave college (Harvard ‘83) in exactly the same tenuous position as most undergrads, having been awarded the prestigious Marshall scholarship and subsequently studying at Cambridge University in England. After leaving Cambridge in 1985, he took an editorial position at the Washington Monthly , which he says “wasn’t for me. I didn’t like D.C., and I swore I’d never come back unless it was to work at the White House.”

He did remain in journalism, though, spending five years as a foreign correspondent in Europe. First as TIME’s Germany correspondent, and then as Berlin bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, he spent the waning years of the Cold War chronicling the reunification of Germany and the emergence of a post-Soviet international order. Benjamin says that his time abroad had a significant influence on the work he would later do studying terrorism: “It was interesting to learn about the views other societies held about political violence.”

Speaking to Benjamin, you get a sense of what attracted him to studying terrorism; he is extremely comfortable with unpredictable situations. As the Cold War wound down, so did his usefulness in Berlin; faced with the choice of relocating either to Moscow or Amman, he instead chose Door #3 and returned to – you guessed it – Washington, D.C. “I got a call from the White House,” he says, “and I decided to give it a whirl. It was an incredible opportunity.” “It,” for those keeping track, was a position on President Clinton’s National Security Council, first as a foreign policy speechwriter for the President, and later as Director for Transnational Threats, working to coordinate America’s counterterrorism policy.

The excitement wasn’t limited to his professional life. “In Washington, I worked 80 to 90 hours a week,” he recounts. “My fiancée [now his wife] is European – she wasn’t used to those hours.” Benjamin recounts one particularly harrowing tale, after he had moved into the White House counterterrorism job: “In the summer of 1998 I bought a house, moved, and my fiancée got a new job. [On August 8th], two of our embassies were bombed. I worked for twelve days straight, and on August 20th, we launched strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan. On August 30th, I was set to get married in Switzerland. I almost didn’t make it. [Working in the White House] definitely had a ‘drinking from the firehose’ quality.”

When the Clinton Administration ended in 2001, Benjamin had to move on. Continuing his focus on studying terrorism, he took a position as a senior fellow in the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program, where he continues to reside happily.

At this point, you may be thinking, “Boy, that sounds like a great career. Now how do I get one of my own?” Never fear; ‘Get A Job’ is here. First, some advice for anyone considering taking time off to travel before entering the workforce: It helps to have a reason. Spending time abroad can be a rewarding experience, Benjamin says, but it is vital to have a passion and a purpose before embarking on your vacation from real life. “Traveling is not about where you go,” Benjamin says, “but what you bring to it. You have to have curiosity.”

Most of all, though, the theme of Daniel Benjamin’s career and his scholarship has been that sense of uncertainty. Growing up, he “had no dreams of being in government or in the White House.” In college, he didn’t spend time furiously mapping the perfect future. Instead of obsessively planning his path, he poured his energy into honing the skills it would take to get there. He didn’t spend time making the perfect plan, he says, because there is no perfect plan. “As a friend of mine once said,” he recounts, “‘the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but the overexamined life isn’t worth writing home about, either.’” So, budding scholars, if you really want to follow in Daniel Benjamin’s footsteps, the best thing to do is to stop trying to trace them. Instead, develop your own passions, work hard, and have the courage to go where life takes you – even if it doesn’t fit into your Master Plan.

Daniel Munz is a senior at Yale. Send him questions, suggestions and love letters at Daniel.a.munz@gmail.com.